Vinay Lal was preparing to leave his office in Bunche Hall one recent evening when a young man stepped into the doorway. “I’m looking for some Republican students,” he told the associate professor of history. “Do you know any?” Lal was so startled by the question that he let out a short laugh. “Republicans are not part of my life,” he responded. “You knocked on the wrong door.”
Had the visitor cast so much as a casual glance at the cartoons, postcards and clippings on Lal’s office door, he probably wouldn’t have knocked in the first place. Lal’s work is widely viewed as firmly grounded in the liberal worldview. In fact, many of his students see him as a radical — a label that Lal himself doesn’t disown because a radical, he says, is “someone who goes to the root of things.”
It is no secret that liberals abound in academia, especially in the humanities, and generally outnumber conservative scholars. In a recent study of more than 1,000 faculty nationwide, professors supporting the Democratic Party outnumbered their Republican peers by at least 7 to 1. The study, co-authored by Daniel Klein, an associate professor of economics at Santa Clara University, comes at a time when liberal-minded professors and administrators have been facing two key charges from conservative critics.
The first is that they tend to use the classroom to politically indoctrinate students; the second, that conservatives are discriminated against in matters of hiring and tenure, and thus discouraged from pursuing academic careers. This bias, the critics say, has created a lopsided university education that sorely lacks viewpoints that counterbalance the liberal standard.
Intellectual diversity has been a fundamental guiding principle of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), the nation’s leading faculty group that safeguards the rights of its members. Last March, it responded to advertisements in campus newspapers by Students for Academic Freedom, a conservative group that called on students to identify liberal professors who misuse the podium. In a statement, the AAUP said that it has “long maintained that instructors should avoid the persistent intrusion of matter, controversial or not, that has no bearing on the subject of instruction.”
UCLA Chancellor Albert Carnesale has also spoken on this issue. “While it may, at times, be useful for an instructor to disclose a political position, such as in a debate or to make clear what his or her personal biases may be, the classroom is not an appropriate place to proselytize about personal political viewpoints,” says Carnesale. The classroom, however, “will always be a good place to examine the bases for both conservative and liberal political thought and policies.” UCLA, the chancellor says, prides itself on its role — one that is essential to all public universities as a venue for the free exchange of ideas representing the full spectrum of political, societal and cultural thought. To that end, he notes that UCLA has hosted speakers ranging from filmmaker Michael Moore on the left to former U.S. Secretary of Education William Bennett on the right.
In its statement on misuse of the podium, the AAUP went on to say that Students for Academic Freedom acted “beyond a concern for poor pedagogy.” The group’s mission, specified in its own ads, was “to rule out of bounds any reference to the war in Iraq in a course whose subject ‘is not the war in Iraq, or statements about George W. Bush in a course that is not about contemporary American presidents,’” the AAUP said, concluding: “Controversy is often at the heart of instruction; good teaching is often served by referring to contemporary controversies, even if only to stimulate student interest and debate.”
Conservative objections to liberal bias have often been linked to politics, and the latest instances appear to be no exception. “This is a very well-orchestrated propaganda effort very similar to the one against the news media to put academia on the defensive and to make us hesitate to continue teaching the way we like to teach,” says Alexander Astin, the Allan M. Cartter Professor of Higher Education and founding director of UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute. “It’s a standard right-wing tactic to criticize academia because academia criticizes government.”
A case in point is an undergraduate Fiat Lux seminar, “Rereading Democracy in America: Politics Before and After 9/11,” which Lal taught in the fall of 2003. The course prompted scathing criticism from David Horowitz, a prominent Los Angeles–based conservative commentator who has been urging Congress and state legislatures to adopt his “Academic Bill of Rights,” a set of principles that he says colleges should follow to create greater intellectual diversity on their campuses. Horowitz castigated Lal for offering certain examples to his students to help them make a mandatory classroom presentation. “A presentation might focus on what the election to California’s governorship of a movie star who has been charged by a dozen women with sexual molestation, drives perhaps the most environmentally unfriendly vehicle in the world and appeared not to have a single idea about governance says about American democracy,” Lal wrote in an online catalog about his course.
Last September, writing in FrontPage-Mag.com, an online magazine that he edits, Horowitz called Lal’s course description “political argument which could not be more remote from any pedagogical enterprise or scholarly inquiry. … Given the pervasive left-wing bias in UC’s academic-hiring process, which has gone on for more than 30 years, this travesty of an academic seminar is neither surprising nor unique.”
Conspicuously absent from Horowitz’s critique was the fact that the bulk of Lal’s course was devoted to a close reading of Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville’s 1835 political classic that is an abiding favorite among conservatives. Instead of mentioning the book, Horowitz berated Lal for assigning another text, Vietnam and Other American Fantasies, by H. Bruce Franklin, whom Horowitz called a “notorious radical.”
The idea that scholarship ought to be completely objective is archaic, Lal says, not least because “the fundamental task of the intellectual is in some sense to go against the grain.” Further, says Lal, echoing an opinion widely shared among liberal faculty, it’s ridiculous to have any parity between liberal and conservative views. “The [conservative] side of the story has been told ad nauseum,” he says. “Students who come to a university like UCLA have heard endlessly about America’s Founding Fathers, for example, unless they’ve walked through school blindly. Such [mythic] narratives are not only overrepresented, but often indefensible” in light of historical research.
Conservatives, for their part, object that far too many members of the faculty are moral relativists who eschew notions of good and evil and don’t believe that certain immutable truths in Western thought are worth preserving. Worse, liberal faculty teach students to view religious and patriotic values with suspicion. That, in any case, is the central idea behind Brainwashed: How Universities Indoctrinate America’s Youth, a book written by Ben Shapiro ’04 and published earlier this year. Shapiro claims that while he was a student at UCLA in 2002, he was fired as a columnist for the Daily Bruin. The reason, according to Shapiro, was that he went on a local radio talk show and criticized UCLA’s “pro-Muslim stance” a reference to the Bruin’s refusal to publish two of his columns against a Muslim-student organization on campus that Shapiro asserted supports terrorism.
In his book, Shapiro names scores of professors in academia whom he calls liberal. One of them is Lynn Vavreck, an associate professor of political science who teaches a popular introductory course on American politics at UCLA. Anyone entering her office in Bunche Hall will quickly notice two framed photographs on the bookshelf of Vavreck with President Ronald Reagan in 1989 and President George W. Bush in 2000. If Vavreck is politically conservative, as the photographs might suggest, why would Shapiro label her as one of the most liberal professors in the nation?
The answer is that Vavreck is not politically conservative; she’s a self-admitted centrist, conservative on some issues, liberal on others. The fact that she’s on a conservative’s blacklist, she says, shows how easy it is to miscast people as liberal or conservative. And yet, says Vavreck, “the polarity between conservatives and liberals in academia is real. There definitely are conservative people and liberal people.”
Another professor Shapiro has accused of liberal bias is Geoffrey Garrett, vice provost and dean of the UCLA International Institute. Since 9/11, as part of the institute’s Middle East programming, Garrett has hosted speakers on campus ranging from Alan Dershowitz, a professor of law at Harvard and author of the book The Case for Israel, to the late Columbia University professor and vocal supporter of Palestinian statehood Edward Said.
Rather than being one-sided, Garrett asserts that the institute’s programming has demonstrably taken the middle ground, presenting both sides of the arguments that are raging in the volatile Middle East. “I am proud of the balance and quality we have achieved on these very difficult but critical matters,” he says.
Amid the outcry over liberal bias, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that certain social sciences have always been strongly conservative. Take economics, with its notions of supply and demand, free enterprise and a view of human nature that says we are motivated by the maximizing of personal gain. “We could just as well argue that young people’s minds are being shaped by these theories as anything else,” points out Astin.
Given that we are molded by our environments, what do scholarly institutions lose if they consist predominantly of like-minded people? “There is a danger that if an institution is politically homogenous, people have a tendency to think that a good thinker is someone who thinks like them, and then to say that we will only hire good thinkers,” argues Eugene Volokh ’83, J.D. ’92, a conservative professor of law at UCLA. “It is not so much that institutions end up being politically lopsided, but that lopsidedness ends up perpetuating this kind of thinking.”
When conservatives feel badly outnumbered, they tend not to speak their minds, says Timothy Groseclose, an associate professor of political science at UCLA. Even their research is sometimes rejected out of hand by liberal peers, as Groseclose says he has experienced. In several seminars, he says, he was frustrated to find that about half the liberal-minded faculty in the audience dismissed the results of his recent study on media bias, in which a Fox News show was found to be almost equally as far to the right of center as comparable shows on NBC and ABC were to the left of center. “They went with their intuition, disregarding the scientific evidence, that they just know Fox News is not as balanced as NBC,” says Groseclose.
It could, of course, be argued that just as the military, with its emphasis on God, flag and country, tends to attract mostly conservative people, universities have a preponderance of liberals because professors tend to embrace certain classically liberal values that form academia’s core: freedom of expression, freedom of inquiry, questioning of authority. But “if everyone is coming from the same direction, I daresay there will be a lot of things that are not going to be researched in all of the social sciences,” says Stephen Hess, Distinguished Research Professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University and senior fellow emeritus at the Brookings Institution. “It’s very troubling, because at the same time we honor the freedom of the professoriate to teach what they want and research what they’re interested in.”
The trouble with the academy isn’t just its liberal bias, adds Hess, but the fact that it has “a very strong anti-American bias.” As it is, public universities feel squeezed economically, and that could get worse as conservative constituents pressure state legislatures to cut funds for political reasons, Hess warns, adding: “Irate parents say that not only are you teaching our children things we don’t believe in, but that you’re teaching them things the country doesn’t believe in.”
When conservative ideas on campuses are seen as beyond the pale, says Peter Pozessky, an associate professor of history at the College of Wooster in Ohio, “the most affected are liberal students who will come out of college convinced that their positions are so correct that they won’t be able to defend their own views or values.” A tenured professor who calls himself a “fairly thick-skinned” moderate conservative, Pozessky says his liberal colleagues are so unused to disagreement that “I’ve had people storm away from the table at lunch.”
The whole idea of liberal bias on campuses is “the biggest bunch of baloney since Spam was packed in cans,” says Mike Lofchie, chair of the Department of Political Science at UCLA. This “new wave of attacks,” as he describes the objections from conservatives, is a “pale image of the more intense and painful attacks” on academia during the McCarthy era. “A great university is one that can find some niche to further knowledge, whether from the liberal or conservative point of view,” says Lofchie. “No great university can put an ideological test on that.”
Yet anecdotal evidence does appear to suggest that competent professors who don’t share liberal values do less well in academia than their liberal peers. “People of conservative views generally get less recognition,” says Julius Getman, an avowedly liberal professor at the University of Texas School of Law. “One colleague of mine, with some justification, says he doesn’t have an academic chair because of his conservative views.” Other academicians Getman has known have fallen victim to political correctness gone awry.
The answer for conservatives concerned about their lack of adequate representation within the academy, argues James Morrison, chair of the Department of English Literature at Claremont McKenna College, “is to get degrees, apply to graduate schools, write dissertations and get the jobs and tenured positions. It’s basically a market-driven issue, and it’s odd that conservatives, of all people, would fail to get that.”
Conservatives respond that the issue is far more complex. “Conservative students who are initially drawn to the humanities often decide after four years of classroom sparring with liberal faculty members that the integrity of such studies is suspect,” Reed Browning, a conservative professor of history at Kenyon College in Ohio, wrote last April in an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education. “Being likelier to have a Hobbesian/Calvinist view of human nature, that individuals in a free society should deal with their own problems rather than rely on government, conservative students are more prone than their liberal peers to see fields like law, business or medicine as career options that offer the possibility of making the world a better place.”
If university education is skewed to the left, can the imbalance be corrected simply by introducing more voices from the right? “The point isn’t to represent all ideas, and the point isn’t to structure a seminar around right-wing and left-wing views that is not the way to transmit knowledge,” says Andrew Aisenberg, chair of the Department of History and the Department of Cultural Studies at Scripps College a liberal sister institution to conservative Claremont McKenna within the Claremont Colleges. “What differentiates the university from other institutions where knowledge is presented, such as the church, is that the university encourages thinking about ideas instead of replacing thinking with preset ideas.”
But that’s precisely what gives the academy its image of the proverbial ivory tower a place too liberal compared to the rest of society. So the question is, what separates the academy from the larger society? “It’s not liberalism, but the idea that identity politics is very strong in the academy,” says Getman. “There is a real commitment to black minority rights, gay rights, women’s rights, but there is little of the old New Deal approach, which is to join everybody together. Working-class people, who themselves have a lot of liberalism, feel left out.”
In short, the disadvantaged who don’t fit into one of the interest groups have been excluded from liberal politics. “There is a tendency to lump all white males together, says Getman, adding: “If liberals are for all sorts of rights but leave out a group that has also been historically underprivileged, that’s liberal faddishness.”
One conclusion that can be drawn from the failure of distributive justice in the United States is that “deep down, this country is profoundly conservative,” says UCLA’s Lal. “The possibility of dissent is so narrow that the definition of liberalism itself has also become considerably more narrow. There is, for example, no substantive difference between John Kerry and George Bush, and it’s illustrative of a strong anti-intellectual streak in this country that one of the worst things that Bush could say about Kerry is that he’s a liberal senator.”
The problem runs deeper. “Part of the anger toward academia is that academics tend to be snobs who have never really had contact with working-class people,” says Getman, who deliberately stopped wearing suits to class years ago so that he wouldn’t come across as the Harvard-educated elite that he is. As academics remain aloof from blue-collar workers, he adds, identity politics exacerbates the problem.
Liberals must understand how they come across to the other side, says Getman. “One hopes that one result of the presidential election would be a serious effort by political liberals and academics, who tend to be part of the same group, to make common cause with ordinary people without regard to whether they are enlightened on all issues and whether they are minorities or not.”
